At a Vulnerable Time, the Sport Discovers Unexpected Resolve

If you are a boxing fan, you will read and hear a lot about the main event of the Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo lightweight title show.

No, not the fight. Friday’s weigh-in.

You will read and hear about how the sport has become an even bigger joke, a growing farce, an increasing scar on the face of athletics, a constant game of half-truths and colorful exaggerations meant to deceive the fans and followers who keep it alive.

Those will be the nice things.

What you may not read or hear is that, at one of its lowest moments, boxing got it right.

They called off a fight. They didn’t take the money and run. They didn’t stand up and rationalize, lie and spin.

The sport will take a big hit in the pocket book and in short-term public relations, but it has a chance to fix something very serious by using the Corrales-Castillo mess as a flash point. Had this fight gone on, as scheduled tonight, with 15,000 paying customers in the Thomas & Mack Center, all hope would have been lost for boxing to be anything more than a con job in a roped ring.

What happened was that Castillo couldn’t make weight. He tried half-a-dozen times and the closest he got to 135 was 139 1/2. This would have been their third fight. The first was a classic, Corrales rising after being knocked down twice in the 10th round and rendering Castillo helpless on the ropes until the fight was stopped. The second was a joke because Castillo couldn’t make weight and they fought anyway, simply without the title at stake. In that one, labeled a 135-pound bout, Corrales fought at 149 and Castillo at 147. Castillo won in the fourth with a left-hook knockout and the debate was on:

* If they can gain that much weight in one day, what’s the point of even calling it a lightweight bout?

* If they gain that much weight in one day, how healthy can that be, and how much must their bodies be abused just to get all the way down to 135 in the first place?

* Were these weigh-ins, held on the day before the event, created for just another day of hype, especially since most of the pay-per-view buys are made in the last 48 hours before a fight? Or were they, as promoter Bob Arum said, created so that fighters would, indeed, have enough time to rehydrate after starving their bodies to make weight?

The important thing was that the focus was on an issue: weight.

Along came Friday and a gaunt, gray-looking Castillo, standing on a scale, in white undershorts, inhaling as if he hoped he could suck five pounds out of his body and exhale it. Even Corrales, who made it exactly at 135, looked like a tired bag of bones.

Now, the issue is inescapable for boxing. It can’t run. It can’t hide. It can’t spin.

The solution is not having weigh-ins the day before.

Dr. Sadiq Mandilawi, staff endocrinologist at Casa Colina Centers for Rehabilitation in Pomona and an expert in rapid weight gain and loss, was given the scenario of the second Corrales-Castillo fight, where each fighter gained between 10 and 14 pounds after the weigh-in, but before the fight. He said three things can happen, none of them good.

“You can get a rise of triglycerides and blood sugar, a danger to the lining of your blood vessels,” he said, “or you can get a rise in blood pressure or irregular heartbeats.”

Nor is the solution having weigh-ins the day of the fight.

Tony Daly, team doctor for the Clippers, an orthopedic surgeon and a longtime boxing fan, said that “is very dangerous. They don’t have enough time to get rehydrated.”

The solution is to stop this farce of having big men try to fight in smaller weight classes.

Neither Corrales nor Castillo belongs at 135 pounds, any more than Arturo Gatti belonged in a 140-pound fight in February 2000, when he gained 20 pounds overnight and beat up Joe Gamache so badly that Gamache retired from the ring and still has a lawsuit pending.

Somebody in boxing has to be given the power to look at the data, look at the fighter and say no.

Friday, that happened after the fact, but it happened. And it wasn’t anybody who had the authority to make the call, just somebody with common sense.

Joe Goossen, Corrales’ trainer, had been unhappy with the second fight, with the fact that his fighter had gone all the way down to make weight and Castillo hadn’t, giving him, in Goossen’s mind, a strength and stamina advantage. Goossen called both fighters “basically welterweights” (147 pounds) and quietly pointed out the potential dangers of letting this fight go on. Eventually, his opinions seemed to find their way to the right people.

Soon, after a long huddle that included Castillo promoter Arum and Corrales promoter Gary Shaw, plus some TV people and Goossen, Shaw announced the fight was off and angrily responded to a reporter’s question by yelling, “This is not about the money. This is about the health, safety and well-being of my fighter.”

As it turned out, boxing had a day in court Friday, instead of in the ring tonight. The public verdict may be disgust. The real verdict should be probation, with a future depending on more good behavior.

Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.